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Better late than never

Valerie Pierce displays a package that her son ordered in 2009. It was delivered earlier this month.

The Bermuda Triangle might be 3,000 miles away, but that’s as good of a guess as any as to where Valerie Pierce’s package has been for the last two years.

Somewhere between Walton, Ky. and Kenai, the package was delayed.

“This was ordered 12-29-09. My son ordered it before he went off to college,” Pierce said, looking at the invoice that came with the 9-by 8 1/2-by-4-inch cardboard box from NFLshop.com that was delivered to her Kenai post office box last week.

When the box arrived, Pierce wasn’t expecting any packages.

“Then when I pulled it out and it was the ’09, I was amazed,” Pierce said.

She called her son Travis, to whom the package was addressed.

“He said, ‘Well, the last thing I ordered from there was that box that never came’,” Pierce said.

The box had just two items in it — an orange Miami Dolphins shirt and a black Kansas City Chiefs shirt, ordered with a Christmas gift card.

The Chiefs shirt was for his then-girlfriend. The Dolphins shirt is his.

The shirt should still fit, she said. And the Dolphins are still his team.

“When he’s little, that’s what he wore, a lot of Dolphins stuff,” Pierce said. “So he’s been with them for a while.”

Travis, was home from North Dakota, where he goes to college, for three weeks when he ordered the shirts online. Pierce said the shirts were originally supposed to take about a week to arrive.

Pierce said that when the package originally failed to show up, she went to the Kenai Post Office with the tracking number. They couldn’t find a record of the item. She went home, double-checked the number, and called again. Still no record. Her son called the shipper and asked if they had sent it. They confirmed they had, and checked the address.

Eventually, Pierce and her son stopped asking about the missing package.

“We just gave up,” Pierce said.

She’ll probably ship it to him in the same box it arrived in, via the United States Postal Service.

“I’m forwarding it to him and hopefully it won’t take that long,” she said.

This was the first time Pierce had a package delivered so late.

“This is the first problem we’ve ever had,” she said.

There’s no real explanation for the long lost delivery.

When she called the post office to see if they had an explanation, they didn’t know why the package took so long. The tracking number still isn’t in the system, she said.

From appearances, it’s hard to say what happened. The box is in good shape.